There is an important law of the universe that American patriotic songs have more verses than you think.
The Star-Spangled Banner? Four verses (the second is the one that begins with “On the shore dimly seen…”). America the Beautiful? Also four verses. Yankee Doodle? Three verses. John Brown’s body you just kind of improvise more verses until everyone is too embarrassed to continue.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when somebody told me recently that there was a rarely-sung sixth verse to Battle Hymn of the Republic.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.
It’s not the most sense-making thing (what is the glory of the morning on the wave?) But I have loved the song for so long that it still affects me. It almost seems deliberately written to be excluded, to be learned later, as if it’s some secret confidence or final warning. If I ever become Christian, it’ll probably be because of this song.
But the wiki page for the Battle Hymn is a trove of all kinds of treasures:
– The original John Brown’s Body song was an attempt to tease a soldier named John Brown in the regiment who invented it.
– Julia Ward Howe says she woke up one night, wrote it while half-asleep, went back to bed, and couldn’t remember any of it the next morning till she checked her notes.
– Mark Twain gave it a gritty reboot for the Philippine-American War. Other parodies and adaptations include ones by workers, consumers, the First Arkansas Colored Regiment, extremely uncreative college footballers, awesome old-timey would-be school arsonists, and me.
But for me the most interesting part is the evolution – and I use that phrase deliberately, taking a memetic perspective is hardly ever more interesting than just doing things the old fashioned way, but in this case I think it is. The song started off as a kind of boring standard spiritual that only sort of got the tune right, progressed into “John Brown’s Body” which fixed the tune a little bit by trial and error but had embarrassingly stupid lyrics, and then a lot of people recognized there was some value in the tune and tried to dignify it up and finally it was Howe’s effort that worked. You can almost see it gaining adaptive fitness at each stage until it suddenly explodes and takes over the world.
I know this is a weird post without much content. My computer is broken and although I have an emergency backup I’m without any drafts or my list of things I wanted to write about. Now I’m just winging it.
So would this be a bad time to point out that in attempting to fix the links in the last post you vanished a lot of the text, up to “criterion of embarrassment”?
Whatever, no one actually reads that far.
(fixed)
Thank you!
The song was also adopted by US paratroopers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_on_the_Risers
That is really cool. I never knew that that hymn was an american patriotic song, or even that it was called the “battle hymn of the republic”. I only know it as a standard churchy hymn called “mine eyes have seen the glory” that we used to sing in school assemblies. Also, we always sang the sixth verse.
I don’t think your list of adaptations would be complete without my alma mater‘s version, the Battle Hymn of the Republic of Letters:
Amazing! <3
Huh, mine was also called “Battle Hymn of the Republic of Letters”, and here I thought I was being so creative.
(I’d assumed the title of yours was an allusion to the St John’s one.)
On the bright side, this appears to be a good candidate for the true title of the song, since multiple traditions arrived at it independently.
Extremely puzzled by the “sixth” verse thing: In the Methodist hymnal, it’s five verses, with your sixth verse as the fifth verse. (Slightly different lyrics: “Honor to the brave” rhymed with “soul of wrong his slave”.)
Edited to add: just looked it up, and I know all six verses. Wonder which one it is that isn’t in the hymnal?
Edited again: Just checked, and it’s the verse that starts “I have read a fiery gospel” which is missing from the Methodist hymnal.
It does seem to be a very modular song. Add, remove or adapt verses as you see fit.
Religion: the original open source. 😀
Probably less relevant if you’re not fighting the US Civil War.
“Glory” can mean “brightness, splendor.” “Morning glory on the wave” would mean “the way the sunshine reflects off a wave in the morning.”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=glory
Exactly. Especially the brightness after a long, dark night
That makes sense, because it starts with “gl”.
Wow, I’d never heard of this, before. The “gl” phonestheme is interesting, but it’s the “sl” that really hammers it home.
Are you aware that this is in direct contradiction to Joshua’s link?
All the gl- words that wikipedia lists have the same etymology, except glory. But according to Joshua’s link, glory received its meaning of brightness because it was used to translate a Hebrew word with a double meaning.
In particular, “glory” is Latin, while all the other gl words are Germanic, so if there were phonesthemic reinforcement, it wouldn’t have applied to glory.
I don’t think phonaesthemes are an entirely etymological phenomenon. I mean, obviously etymology is involved, but I assume there are other processes at work as well. For instance, why did someone choose to translate that particular biblical word as “glory”, and not as some other English word? Was it because they already had some implicit association between the letters “gl” and words pertaining to light, and so the word “glory” seemed fitting?
I mean, it could be that the “brightness” meaning of “glory” really has nothing to do with the phonaestheme. I don’t want to make any specific claims about how that word’s meaning arose. Instead, I want to make the general point that etymology does not have to be the only source of phonaesthemes.
Jerome did not choose the Latin word “gloria” because of Germanic words starting with “gl.” The word received the light meanings in Latin and Romance languages because of the Bible, not because of German.
For the rest of the “gl” words, I don’t know how to distinguish the phonaesthemia hypothesis from etymology.
Oh, oops, I was misreading the etymology page. Thanks.
I don’t know the origins of the other ‘gl’ words, but iirc there are psycholinguistics experiments that show that phonaesthemes are psychologically real. That is, we do actually mentally associate “gl” with light, “sn” with the nose, and so on. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything else about the studies.
“I don’t think phonaesthemes are an entirely etymological phenomenon.”
They are not. There are clear examples of a phonestheme evolving or arising in English by sucking in unrelated words. On example is “sleazy”, which originally referred to a fabric made in Silesia/Schlesien.
I saw a site once, which I cannot find, that listed English phonesthemes and it was clear from the examples that the forms had existed in isolation and the phonestheme had arisen later as speakers associated the forms and meanings into a phonestheme.
Thanks for the concrete example!
My next question is: do phonaesthemes ever turn into full-blown morphemes? (Also, where do morphemes come from in general?)
Here are John Lawler’s materials on phonesthemes, including (pdf warning): br-, cl-.
Darcey,
“My next question is: do phonaesthemes ever turn into full-blown morphemes? ”
I can’t think of a case where that has happened, but I can’t see why it couldn’t.
I can think of cases where groups of words with the same phonestheme can begin to look like real word families; in other words the words are not etymologically related the way real word families are.
P-K word family, e.g. punch, peak, pike, bung, punk and probably fuck. These are probably all true cognates, reflexes of some ancestral form, and do really belong to a word family. And then there are others, like, puncture, point, etc, that derive from Latinate forms, but which still probably derive form some ancestral form, given the common ancestry of Germanic and Italo-Celtic.
But then there is “puka” – ‘hole though something’ which clearly cannot be ancestrally related to that word family since it’s a loan from an Austronesian language – absolutely no possible relation.
I figured it was something like that, but “the way the sunshine reflects off a wave in the morning” is a difficult association for “something that is coming inevitably”, although when I think about it further it does work.
You’re still not gonna convince me “the soul of time” is a thing, though.
It might not be meant to emphasis that rather than, well, the gloriousness of it.
Also, the way it starts a little, then spreads a lot very quickly.
It can also mean an optical phenomenon that resembles an iconic saint’s halo, which I think would make sense here.
I rather think “morning glory on the wave” means the sun itself rising over the sea. Compare this verse from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, describing a ship that passes in front of the sun at sunset:
The “western wave” is the western horizon.
I read the “coming like the glory of the morning on the wave” line as a naval attack at dawn; the ships just short of the waves’ breakline, the sun rising behind them and each sailor/marine on deck looking down their long shadow, with a glory reflected from the mist surrounding their head like a halo.
If I were to illustrate this interpretation, it would be something like a Brocken spectre.
It is highly likely that this image/interpretation is excessively influenced by availability bias and the cover art of Leo Frankowski’s Radiant Warrior novel (Conrad Stargard series). Content warning: implausibly competent nerd travels back in time, invents all the things, wins all the fights, gets all the girls, establishes Communist+Catholic+Objectivist utopia, discovers that every other character in his universe was made of cardboard.
Which is really weird, because I am a Christian and I don’t like the song one bit. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a church that actually sang it.
I think it belongs to a particular very progressive brand of Christianity. One with a creed of “Let’s go out and MAKE THE WORLD BETTER WITH GOD,” rather than “let’s sit quietly and ponder Death and never go anywhere,” as I think you were suggesting in one of your comments on Meditations on Moloch.
I’ve always loved it and I’m not a Christian, but it belongs to a period in the history of my country where we righted a very clear wrong, maybe not in the best way, maybe not always for the right reasons, maybe we didn’t do a complete job of it, but dammit we abolished slavery over the objections (and the guns) of the people who demanded their ‘right’ to own people as a terminal value which the rest of the country had to bow to.
Yes!
Im Catholic and we always sing this song around 4th of July.
Heres Orson Welles on the great Hymn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GCfM60RriM#t=38
Extremely popular with Mormons, who aren’t obviously progressive Christians. Not to say you can’t make a double-bankshot argument that Mormons are actually progressive Christians and, who knows, you might even be right. But when you think ‘progressive Christians,’ Mormons isn’t what first comes to mind.
Also, the two progressivish Chrisian denominations I can remember looking through their hymbnbooks didn’t have it, presumably because its too militant and/or nationalist.
I suppose this is a good time to point out that Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in which a German spy during World War II is caught by his knowledge of the third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner – the logic being that most Americans only knew the first verse, but spies who had been trained in American culture would have learned all four.
But clearly the officer who thought of that test was also a German spy, since he knew there were multiple verses too! The only possible explanation is that one German spy needed to out another as part of some fiendishly complex plot among triple agents.
‘”except for me, and I know everything,” added Griswold’
Knowing everything would seem to be a valid excuse.
I’m pretty sure the idea’s been around since long before Asimov, but I find that the two similar things I have in my brain are entirely unknown to the hive-mind of the Web. (One: the saying “Only children and spies know the second verse of the National Anthem”, this referring to “God save the {King/Queen}”. Two: a snippet of dialogue from, I dunno, the Napoleonic wars or something, ending with A: “Sing me the second verse of the Marseillaise.” B: “I don’t know it.” A: “Pass, Frenchman.”)
I know the second verse! It goes “hurr nurr nurr nurr GOD SAVE THE QUEEN”. ;-p (to paraphrase Pratchett).
For some reason I associate the Battle Hymn of the Republic with Ireland, not the USA.
I asked my brain if it knew the words to “God Save the Queen” and got back “of course!”.
So I asked myself to sing it and got:
Um… nope.
Nicht Ross nicht Reisige
Sichern die steile Höh’
Gott save the Queen!
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
Wie Fels im Meer.
Ignoring the last three verses of the song was a real-life pet peeve of Asimov’s. It’s one of mine, too – the first verse asks a question which is answered in the second. If the godawful singers at sports games didn’t stretch every note out for 5 minutes, they could fit two verses into the same time span and the song would be coherent. Is that so much to ask?
It was a great refreshment to me when they had an opera singer sing it. Which also has the advantage of not making a mockery of its militaristic nature (which some of the more angry pop singers could avoid, Taylor Swift could probably avoid, but they *don’t*.)
Tangential, but worth noting: The piece you have linked is not the original written by Isaac Asimov, but a drastic shortening of it. Here’s a link complaining about this (and how it changes the meaning of the original); at the bottom (“Asimov Scan 1” through “Asimov Scan 6”) can be found scans of the original, along with a transcription (skip to “The following text”).
Meta!
Ha! I didn’t even notice.
I must know the story behind your handle!
And on a historically relevant, but geographically irrelevant note:-
Lord, grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush and like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush
God save the King
(May Eula not crush our own rebellious Scott…)
Eula? Uh oh.
Now I am worried that the name of Scott’s chosen goddess is just an anagram for the name of this demon.
Apparently there are indeed people named “Eula”.
(“Eula Biss” makes me think of a giant vortex opening underneath Christmas)
How… ah, “yoola”. I’ve been pronouncing it “oyla” in my head.
And I in turn have only just noticed that “Elua” is (aside from diacritics) “Aulë” backwards.
45% of Scots disapprove of that verse.
Yes. But they are not true scotsmen.
You jest, but there is a kind of distinction between “Proud Scots” and “People of Scotland” which is relevant to the 45% figure quoted above 🙂
The 45% who voted for independence are mostly left-libertarian-ish, declaring the sovereignty of the people (residents, not nationals) of Scotland, whereas the arguments from the other side of the debate included a lot of “I’m proud to be Scottish but… (the UK authoritarian rightist state knows best)”
Not hiding my own allegiance particularly well, I know. Not a True Scotsman, me.
>“I’m proud to be Scottish but… (the UK authoritarian rightist state knows best)”
>implying Scottish authoritarian rightist state would know better
I know, I’m Scottish myself. I’ve been trying to make that joke for the whole campaign. 😛
I found arguments about Scottishness amusing as a result. But no-one else seemed to see the irony.
EEEEE! Scott, I love you even more. But too bad about your computer, I hope it gets fixed fast and well.
So I think it’s apropos to post my own version of the Battle Hymn lyrics, the (so far untitled) national anthem of the Star Kingdom of Arcturus, the central nation of a science fiction novel project of mine.
A little bit of backstory: I wanted Arcturus to be a mishmash of Progressive and Reactionary policies, so they have a king and an aristocracy, but the senior military branch is only open to commoners and a handful of landless nobles, and part of its job is protecting commoners against potential abuses by local nobles and corporations.
In my backstory, the anthem was written around the time the Arcturans, genetically engineered slave-workers kept in line by a combination of religion, ignorance, and brutal violence, threw off the shackles of the Orion Corporation that had created them. Arcturus descended into chaos a la Post-Soviet Afghanistan for a while, the Orion corporation tried to invade and retake the planet, and King Hank I united the planet by a combination of diplomacy and butt-kicking to throw off the Orionids and found the Kingdom. The song is ‘set’ and written from the experiences of the first revolt, and doesn’t reference God because Hank was an atheist and had a deep mistrust of religion anywhere near government.
BTW, I was aware of the 6th verse while writing this but it sounded silly so I didn’t include it.
My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Law,
For all who have been broken by unfeeling avarice,
Their footsteps ring upon the earth, to serve the wicked notice,
Justice is marching on.
(Chorus)
Glory, glory, Justice marches!
Glory, glory, we will be free,
Glory, glory, hear the footfalls!
Justice is marching on.
They march upon the mountains, and they march across the plains
To where the wicked oppressor is secure in their domains
They’re loosing all the shackles, and they’re breaking all the chains,
Justice is marching on.
(Chorus)
I have read a shining message writ by shining men of steel,
“As you have judged your workers, so with you my judge shall deal,”
let the hero, born in shackles, crush the serpents with their heel,
Justice is marching on.
(chorus)
They are sounding out the trumpet that shall never call retreat,
calling all good people before the judgement-seat,
Oh, be swift, my heart, to answer them! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our Law is marching on.
(chorus)
In the squalor of the slavepit we were born to work for greed,
With a fire in our hearts that shall never know defeat,
As we were freed by hands unknown, let us fight for liberty,
While Law is marching on.
(chorus)
The final and best words to go with that song are Half Man Half Biscuit’s “Vatican Broadside”.
I have read those lyrics and I notice I am confused.
“America the Beautiful” has more than four verses.
It looks like of those eight verses, 1 & 5, 2 & 6, and so on are the same but with very minor changes. If I had to guess, somebody pasted a final version of the song onto a rough draft.
Another song with bonus verses: This Land Is Your Land.
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me
This land is your land. This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
Outside of relatively obscure corridors of american history departments, the puritan influences on this country, particularly the northern bits of it, are usually dramatically understated or completely forgotten . This is a bad thing. The puritans are the most successful tribe in human history. 3 centuries ago they were a few thousand radical exiles living on the far edge of civilization, today their creed is the conventional wisdom of most of mankind.
You want to explain this? I mostly think of Puritans as wearing silly hats and not wanting people to have sex, and modern people don’t do either of those things.
The Puritan work ethic frequently gets a nod in this sort of situation. Separation of church and state is also basically a Puritan concept, probably stemming from friction with the Anglican authorities during the (fantastically tumultuous, religiously speaking) early 1600s in Britain.
Nonconformists like Locke and Milton suggested separation of Church and State (following the Dutch? Grotius?). But Puritans are more specific than Nonconformist. They came to America to have as tight a Church and State as possible. Roger Williams was a Puritan who advocated separation and later fled Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, but he was not typical. The American idea is really due to Jefferson, specifically to defend against Puritans.
Various historic empires can claim precedence on this. They may have had a state religion but in practice there was more religious tolerance than many modern states.
Edward Gibbon wrote in reference to the Mongol Empire, “…a singular conformity may be found between the religious laws of Zingis Khan and of Mr Locke.”
Albion’s seed is an excellent starting point. The puritans are the ones largely responsible for the culture of new england and great lake states. there is a direct descent, both intellectual and physical from the puritans to patriots, then abolitionists, then christian socialists, and now progressives. Were I to sum up american history in a sentence it would be, america was settled by number of tribes of outcasts from England chief among whom was the puritans who went on first to dominate their region, then the US as whole, and finally the world. Oh, and the puritans were quite keep on sex, they reproduced at faster rates than anyone else in the new world, rates pretty close to the biological maximum. They just wanted sex ordered and regulated, like everything else.
My personal favorite, from the DM Screen for Paranoia (2nd ed.):
The Battle Hymn of Alpha Complex:
Mine eyes have seen the coming of another Commie horde,
If I can hold them off alone Hot Fun is my reward,
“Please engage the menace, Citizen” I hear on my comcord,
When will the Vultures arrive?
(Chorus)
Glory, Glory, Hail Computer
Glory, Glory, Hail Computer
Glory, Glory, Hail Computer
My clone keeps marching on.
They’re advancing on all sides now and I’ll soon be overrun,
I try to open fire but there’s a malfunction with my gun,
So I toss a nuke grenade and then turn tail and run,
When will the Vultures arrive?
(Chorus)
The Commies are all vapor now and for that I’m real glad,
My geiger-counter indicates I took a thousand rad,
I check with the Computer and find out that’s not too bad,
When will the docbot arrive?
(Chorus)
You’re welcome, Scott. 🙂
My favorite alternate version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
(You really have to listen to the whole thing for the full effect, but the impatient can skip ahead to 3:30 if they get bored.)
I hate you. So much.
(I feel that this comment is both necessary and totally justified, since that song was stuck in my head ALL DAY yesterday. Click the link. It’s horrifying.)
Why did I never realize before clicking that link that the tune of that song is from the Battle Hymn of the Republic?
There’s also a version that’s set to “Buffalo Gals”.
I’m reminded of a webcomic I once read. (No audio, but may not be safe for sanity anyway.)
I desire for someone (komponisto?) to appear and explain why this elicits a very strong sensation of “hey stop that, you are not moving forward in your song.”
My guess would be that it keeps repeating the same damn thing over and over for…at least 2 minutes and something (that was as long as I gave it before skipping to 3:30). At least, that was my reaction. (I was also annoyed by the deviation of the third measure of the tune from the original, in particular the awkward postponement of the motion to the subdominant, but that may be a personal issue.)
There seems to be an inside joke that I’m missing; as far as I can tell the video would have been no worse had it consisted of a single “Battle Hymn”-ish verse (or maybe two, for the self-referential joke) followed by whatever-the-hell-that was at the end.
Oh, so that’s why that measure sounds wrong! Thanks.
The video is a variant on a Rickroll – a common prank where you trick people into clicking on a link that takes them to a Youtube video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”. This particular video was created for the AMV contest at Anime Boston in 2008 and entered under the “Comedy” category; the convention sets aside a room and a time for the convention goers to watch and vote on the contest entries. Apparently, it lost by six votes.
See also: Overly Long Gag
IT’S A TRAP DON’T DO IT
Huh! Until now, whenever people spoke of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, I thought they were referring to something from Star Wars. SSC never ceases to broaden my knowledge.
Battle Hymn of the Paperclip:
My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of AI
It shall prove that it believes the truth of theorems it derives
Calculate volition and then optimize our lives
And spread the moral light of man to stars across the sky
Science fiction meets construction
In existential risk reduction
Updateless or Solomonoff Induction?
Explosion or the crack of dawn?
Other nations have omitted lyrics to their national anthems:
La Marseillaise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise#Additional_verses
God Save the Queen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Save_the_Queen#Alternative_British_versions
Advance Australia Fair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair#Lyrics
It has to be said that (with any set of words) “Advance Australia Fair” is a strong contender for Least Stirring National Anthem Ever. Words and music both.
“National Anthems and Suicide Rates“.
Excellent! (I like the idea of someone called Gunn writing a paper about suicide, too.)
The emotional core of the song, for me, is in this verse:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me,
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free!
While God is marching on.
In every YouTube video I’ve played the song in (which is a lot; it’s one of my favorites) the lyric is changed to “let us LIVE to make men free”. Absolutely diminishes the sacrifice that makes the song meaningful. And this is standard for army choirs too, who I would expect to know better.
It’s a battle hymn. It’s literally about dying. Why is this erased?
This.
Because effectiveness. Other than Christ, whose effect was caused by his bloody painful suffering death, very few (I suspect zero, but I am covering my ass) heroes made their effect by dying. Most heroes, even those who die in the doing, die as a result of whatever effect they achieve.
I go with “live,” or “fight,” as in my version above. Because you can do more good if you do not die. If you die in the doing, so life goes, and we will honor your sacrifice, but we’d rather you live so you can keep doing the job and living your life and being a joy to your family.
By contrast, “let us die to make men free” sounds like a recruiting pitch for suicide bombers. I’m not a fan of telling people to go die.
And yet Lincoln’s Second Inaugural also endorses the sacrificial sin-offering theory of the American Civil War:
So it would seem to have struck a chord.
To Christians, in a Christian society, where the otherwise-meaningless doctrine of blood atonement and the Lord passing judgement (which implies some amount of thought behind its judgements and thus its punishments), the “let us die to make men free,” and the blood atonement make sense, just like Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Thus, for its context, Lincoln’s second inaugural makes sense.
On the other hand, in a world of suicide bombers and creepy martyr incentives from all religions and ideologies, it might be time to pull back from the “glorification of sacrifice” to the “Glorification of *effectiveness.*” Thus I sing “live” or “fight,” depending.
And it does make sense for army choirs to “know better” than to sing “die.” A quote attributed to a US Army battalion commander on the eve of Desert Storm (and I’ve traced it back to an author, John Ringo, who was himself in the Army): “Heroes happen because somebody made a mistake. We don’t want any heroes today.” Soldiers don’t sign up to die, they sign up to serve, and know that serving might mean dying, but they sign up for a lot of reasons including health benefits, housing/education/pension benefits, patriotism, and all kinds of reasons that are hard to enjoy when dead.
I agree with you, but I understand why its normally changed–because its sung in settings where the congregation is not going to be asked to die anytime soon, but where living a better, more dedicated life would be a good thing. In other words, its the Battle Hymn as filtered through the Gettysburg Address.
Or perhaps Patton’s advice that he wanted his men to make the other poor bastards die for their country.
For the record I like this post and endorse more short and interesting posts. Not everything needs to shake our worlds, after a while they need to settle.
Agreed.
If you liked that, you’ll love the buildup to the 4th verse of the Star Spangled Banner.
I have always felt that much of Solidarity Forever could just as easily be Objectivist (as long as you drop the bit about unions); to wit:
Ayn Rand’s class analysis is perilously close to Marx’s, actually! It’s just that she drew the lines of who was productive and who was exploitative differently, and was familiar with different faces of Moloch — probably because Rand spent her formative years in Soviet Russia and Marx grew up in an aristocratic Europe that was slowly and painfully becoming capitalist.
Could ‘glory of the morning’ be ‘morning glory’, as in Ipomoea sp.? The colours of the flowers kinda fit.